John Lennon: beneath the surface of a flawed hero

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If John Lennon had lived he would have been 75 on Friday, October 9, 2015. Instead, he was shot in 1980, outside the apartment building in New York where he had lived for nine years. Radio 2 has marked the anniversary with a two-part Monday-night series, John Lennon: the New York Years. Radio 4 devoted its Archive on 4 hour on Saturday toJohn Lennon Verbatim. All three programmes were made by Des Shaw for independents Ten Alps. There were thus bound to be common uses of source material, overlaps in the narrative but differences in style.

The Radio 2 series had film star Susan Sarandon as narrator, and drew on reminiscences from journalists, photographers and friends. Part one traced the rise of The Beatles’ fame in the US, from their first Ed Sullivan shows to after they split and Lennon, having fallen in love with Yoko Ono and out of love with Britain (lack of privacy, constant press intrusion), moved to New York, where he could go out for a chocolate milkshake in peace. Part two last night looked at the later years, how his music changed, why he loved the city so. Colourful, fast moving, it was hard to know who was talking because Sarandon breathed their names so softly.

John Lennon in New YorkCredit:
Michael Ochs Archives

Radio 4’s programme had no narrator but started further back, with what The Beatles wanted (to be bigger than Elvis) and ended with Lennon being happy, having come back to Ono (after an interlude with May Pang, one of the contributors to the Radio 2 shows) and able to write songs again. There was a real wealth here of Lennon being frank (about booze making him aggressive, for instance) and very funny (on the effects of taking LSD by accident in London) and equally open about how the Maharishi episode had left him destroyed.

But to whom was he talking, and when? This was clearly a conversation. Murmurs of encouragement were audible, sounding female but never identified. Why does it matter? Because what we say, whether in interview or casual conversation, depends on who is listening. Good historians always attribute sources and give their date. I wished for that here.

Michael Goldfarb

Bliss Was It in that Dawn (Radio 3, all week at 10.45pm) has a fine analysis of where memory and history elide. Michael Goldfarb is recalling growing up in New York in the mid-Fifties and the early Sixties. Does nostalgia blur the edges of fact? Were things always better when we were young? He admits to the first but argues that things really were better, more hopeful, in the US then.

The “American dream” of hard work producing success came true for his parents. Their parents had come to New York from eastern Europe, fleeing persecution. His parents would move from the three-bedroom downtown apartment he remembers as smelling of “toast and urine” to a six-room apartment uptown, off Park Avenue. From there he would walk to school, roam anywhere, play with kids on other streets. Over the next decades that freedom would shrink and, by 2012, America would become, in his view, the “United States of Anxiety”. He speaks softly, his prose illuminates.

Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Mrs Thatcher, Everything She Wants, is being serialised in this newspaper and, all week, read daily on Radio 4 as its Book of the Week. In case you don’t remember 1984 when Wham!’s funky disco hit sold a million, its lyric begins “Somebody told me, ‘Boy, everything she wants is everything she sees’”.

The radio version begins and ends with a few bars of it. They sound odd when you’re expecting the inside story, for instance, of what happened in the handover to China of Britain’s lease on Hong Kong. Happily, that was all there and in gripping detail. Nicholas Farrell’s reading modulates smoothly between Moore’s elegant digests of recent history and direct quotes from Mrs Thatcher whose voice Farrell does not so much imitate as, in a breathy lower tone, evoke.

In Friday’s Daily Telegraph, Moore admitted he didn’t know the song. “My attention was drawn to it,” he said. I hope he notices the way it parallels his account of how, after the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher’s election victory made her more “outspokenly rude” to her ministers, more absolute in her judgments. Produced and abridged by Jill Waters for her own independent production company, this version directs the ear to Moore’s gift for ironic insight. For, as anyone who remembers the song knows, it goes on to warn “Girl, it’s just a matter of time…”